Glurge: Young Todd Beamer receives pitching tips from baseball great Jackie Robinson.
Status: False.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2002]
The following story is true. It was first printed in "Chicken Soup for the Adolescent Soul." The eight year old Little League pitcher had been shellacked An old black man with a metal detector came to the field looking for coins. He noticed the boy sitting in the rain crying, but said nothing. After a while, it just became too much, so he went to talk to him. "Tell you what," he said, "I used to play some ball, why don't you throw me a few?" They started to play some catch, and the old man gave the kid some pointers on his pitching style. More importantly, he told the boy to never give up. A game is just a game, but a It was a lesson the boy never forgot. He went back on the mound the next game, and they won. In fact, his team went all the way that season. The pitching tips helped, but the words of encouragement were worth so much more. The old man's name was Jackie Robinson. The boy was Todd Beamer, the "Let's Roll" hero of One faced racial discrimination and prevailed. The other faced terrorists and became an inspiration for a nation. Never give up |
Origins: What's better than a glurgy piece of fiction created to embellish a hero's reputation? How about a fabricated account that brings together two heroes in a work of glurgerrific
synergy?
This touching and inspiring item intertwines the lives of Jackie Robinson, the man who became an icon for the American civil rights movement after breaking major league baseball's color barrier in 1947, and Todd Beamer, one of the heroes of the
How do we know it's not true? After his final season of baseball in 1956, Robinson served as a spokesman and executive for various companies before dying of a heart attack in 1972 at the relatively young age of 53 — he never became an "old man" who spent his final days shuffling around suburban baseball fields looking for coins with a metal detector. Moreover, it's hard to imagine the circumstances under which Todd Beamer and Jackie Robinson could have accidentally crossed paths: Beamer was born in Flint, Michigan, and spent his childhood in Wheaton, Illinois, but Robinson lived nowhere near either of those places in his post-retirement years.
However, the telling blow is that Todd Beamer was born on
Last updated: 24 February 2008